]]>Greater attention has recently been paid to income inequality. Piketty’s analysis in Capital in the Twenty-first Century, has been a top news story; indeed the World Economic Forum, a major meeting of world leaders and policymakers, identified “severe income disparity” as one of the top “global risks” .

One important solution to inequality that should play a greater role in discussions is land reform: redistribution of agricultural land from those who have lots of land to those who are landless or land-poor. In the world of international development, land reform has largely fallen off the agenda in favour of industrial development as a solution to poverty. Poverty and inequality are related, of course, but not identical. My own graduate students quickly counter my suggestion of the importance of land reform by citing the failure of Zimbabwe’s land redistribution.

It is important to know that land reform has been a staple of the modern era in socialist countries such as China and the Soviet Union and those with covertly or openly anti-communist agendas such as Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. As these examples suggest, reform has not only been a powerful force for challenging rural poverty by giving land to the landless; it has also been foundational to economic growth by providing increased food production to feed large numbers of industrial workers and by increasing incomes among the rural poor so that they can buy consumer goods. There are political consequences too. In a classic analysis of the causes of different forms of government, Barrington Moore in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, argues that large landholding classes are one of the factors leading to fascism.

China, a nation that arguably carried out the largest-scale land reforms in history, is an interesting case illustrating the importance of land redistribution. In the early 20th Century Sun Yat Sen made land to the tiller a centerpiece of the reforms he advocated. Following the Communist victory in 1949, the first and most important social transformation they carried out was to send groups of educated youth, “work teams,” into Chinese villages to confiscate the land of the landlords and redistribute it in equal parcels to each village family (including to landlords, although those landlords who had been particularly bad, “bullies,” were executed; one million such executions are estimated to have occurred). China collectivised rural production in 1958 but returned to the policy of allocating parcel of land to each peasant family in the early 1980s.

China’s extremely rapid industrialisation in the last two decades, making it the world’s largest manufacturer and exporter, and the second largest economy in the world, has earned it praise from most of the development establishment. In my view, however, China’s real contribution to development theory is its land reforms. Unlike so much of the developing world, China’s rural people – half of the nation’s population – do not suffer from landlessness. All families are allotted plots of land in a process that is fair and equitable.

Economist Yasheng Huang, in Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, shows that it was in the 1980s, not the 1990s era of massive industrialisation, that China saw the greatest drop in rural poverty. Huang celebrates the earlier decade for the vibrant creation of non-agricultural rural enterprises: is not just land reform that mattered. But having land to fall back on gave many rural entrepreneurs the courage, if not the capital as well, to start these private businesses, while the urban-led 1990s industrialisation undermined small-scale rural industry in complex ways.

As many will know, China in the industrial era has become better-off but much more unequal, with a Gini coefficient of at least 0.47. During recent travels to areas I have visited for over two decades, I have seen major changes but also continuing poverty and desperation. Land to all peasants is, sadly, necessary but not sufficient, especially when food prices are too low to produce enough income for many farmers. Low farm incomes are the main reason so many peasants have fled to cities in search of work in the first place,(although many have returned home due to exploitative work and low pay in urban factories and construction sites.

Even sadder, however, China is in the process of dismantling land reform, as local governments appropriate land from many peasant families for real estate development. This summer I heard few worries about China undoing its greatest revolutionary legacy. Neither officials nor peasants seem worried, for complicated reasons. But academics should not reinforce Chinese myopia. The importance of land reform should attract as much attention as inequality itself, since it is an important means, even if not sufficient in itself, to challenge the persistent poverty and inequality found throughout the developing world.

In my first post I discussed curent UN initiatives to develop the SDGs – or sustainable development goals – for the coming decades. One goal, receiving a great deal of attention, is how to combat poverty and inequality. In this post I will discuss some of my own thoughts on this topic.

We live in a world where most of us must work in order to earn the means to buy food, housing and other necessities of life. This world seems so natural to us that we cannot imagine living in a world without work.

But most scholars’ personal views of work have caused us to overlook structural transformations that are likely to lead to the end of work and to massive unemployment for most people. These transformations will compel us to dramatically rethink on what grounds the basics of life are distributed. If, say, 50% of people lack formal employment due to increasing efficiencies in industry and services (see, for example, Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work), can we still require people to work in order to eat? If we do not change our thinking, increases in inequality and poverty will result.

Let me tell a personal story to illustrate how work is being restructured. As a young college graduate in the early 1980s, I was a social worker charged with finding jobs for unemployed Chicago youth in poor neighborhoods. This was during the Ronald Reagan years, when many non-poor Americans were told poverty was caused by lazy people unwilling to work. My year’s experience in Chicago readily challenged this view. As I looked for jobs in de-industrialised neighbourhoods, I could easily see that many jobs were no longer there. At one site I was told 200 people had been employed full-time at a shampoo factory the previous year. The year of my visit there was only one worker, to control the new machines and computers running the factory.

This is a familiar story. But what shocks me is that I rarely hear anyone think about or discuss the situation clearly. A usual way of dismissing the obvious reduction in the number of jobs is to say, ‘Well, there will be work in the new economy, work that requires more skills’, but if a central goal of the new economy is to produce more with fewer workers—indeed isn’t increased efficiency a central goal of industrial capitalism?—then there can’t be, and shouldn’t be, as many jobs in the new economy as in the old one. If in the example above, 200 full-time employees were needed to build and run the computers and machines now making shampoo, then the switch to machines would clearly have been a disaster for the industry owner. We must accept that increased efficiency should, and will, lead to fewer jobs.

It is at this point that panic often sets in among policymakers. Fewer jobs? Then how will people make a living? To me, the solution seems simple. Just as agricultural efficiencies freed up so many in previous generations to move away from hard farm labour into jobs that were more desirable and enjoyable (at least in principle), so should new efficiencies allow us a new freedom: freedom from the obligation to work to live.

I am not anti-work. Humans have a great desire to create. But the obligation to work often interferes with our freedom to create. Obligation often decreases the pleasure we feel in doing something, especially if that obligation takes the form of ‘work or you won’t eat’. To me one of the true dividends of the new economy is reduced drudgery giving us more time for meaningful endeavors. We can take more time to write poetry, or do whatever creative activity pleases us, as we spend less time at supposedly obligatory jobs that are unsatisfying.

But of course, this dividend can only accrue if we also institute redistribution. To many on the right, providing food and housing to everyone is a troublesome idea. I will not argue here with their objections but rather point out a truth: whether or not we want distribution, the relentless increasing efficiencies of much of capitalist industrialisation will make a redistributive economy a necessity. Such change is inevitable. Our only choice would be whether to embrace it so that the tremendous liberating potential it confers is fully realised.

Poverty and inequality can be solved in a world of productive plenty and the lives of all of us, poor and non-poor, can likewise be immeasurably enriched. We just need to think creatively to make it happen.

]]>A perennial frustration for most of us who are social scientists is that we have many things to say about how to make the world better but few, very few, people and institutions are willing to listen to our ideas. There are exceptions, however. An important one is the United Nations and its initiative to develop a set of goals – the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs – for the world to meet in the coming years. First, I will give some background about the SDGs and then discuss a recent meeting I attended at the UN in New York on this topic.

The SDGs are being formulated to succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), eight goals agreed upon by world leaders in 2000. The MDGs called upon countries throughout the world (with an emphasis on developing countries) to cut poverty in half, achieve gender parity in education, and meet other worthy targets. As a cultural anthropologist with an interest in development, I can say that many nations take the MDGs seriously, spurred on by a competitive desire to do better than other developing countries in similar situations. Even though not all of the MDGs will be met by 2015, the deadline year for their completion, progress has definitely been made.

The SDGs seek to preserve important goals of the MDGs, such as poverty alleviation, while expanding the number and scope of the goals to be met. In particular preservation of the environment is a new dimension. Equally important for social scientists to know is that the UN is seeking to involve civil society, including social scientists, in the formulation of the SDGs – now well under way. In February, I attended the eighth meeting of the Open Working Group on the SDGs followed by the Commission for Social Development meeting. The proceedings of both meetings have been recorded and are available at UN Webtv (search for “Open Working Group” and “Commission for Social Development”).

Here are some highlights from the meetings.

Inequality

There is an interesting debate on how to address inequality. At both meetings high-level academic experts and United Nations leaders formed panels on different topics; inequality was discussed frequently. Some advocate a stand-alone goal to address inequality but do not want inequality to replace a goal to end poverty. After all, the goals are closely related. What makes the inequality goal interesting is that it encourages us to attend to the structures responsible for perpetuating inequality, critiquing wider social issues in a manner less frequently seen in discussions of poverty.

Discussions of poverty often focus on how to move poor people into new jobs where they can earn more money – out of agriculture and into factory jobs, for example. An examination of inequality might ask, more broadly, why farmers are so underpaid in the first place. In my opinion, one cannot address poverty and inequality without first discussing the structural features that perpetuate these related phenomena, as threatening to many elites as such a discussion could be.

Gender issues

The MDGs have been rightly criticised for being insufficient in the goals they set for gender equality. Speakers at the UN meetings noted the absence of goals to make contraception and abortion easily available to women. There was also an impassioned plea that the SDGs include a target for reducing domestic violence against women. Most of those speaking believed that there should be both a separate goal for women’s issues as well as the integration of gender throughout the SDGs. I was pleased to hear so many speakers, including representatives of countries not known for gender equality, and males as well as females, argue forcefully for gender equality. The co-chair of the open working group even deemed as historic the impassioned statements on the issue during one of the sessions.

Governance

A controversial topic is whether there should be an SDG for good governance and what such a goal should specify about the nature of good government. Many speakers argued forcefully that without good governance and rule of law there is little hope of meeting new SDGs. Others added that a good governance goal should call for an end to armed conflict between and within nations. These speakers noted how devastating such conflict is and how it slows, or reverses, progress toward addressing poverty and challenging oppression in all its forms.